Whilst I was at Kim's, we read Smoke and Fluff, about two naughty kittens.

I have decided to delete the rest of the post; I'm not satisfied with its quality now that I'm sober. It's certainly not as good as this classic of English literature.

Kim sent me a postcard, thanking me for "a truly wonderful time". It'll have a privileged place on my bedroom wall.

Yesterday, Trina and I coated the air with the fishy smell of kippers and lemon sole, then went for a drink before this month's wine tasting. It was the Veneto region, and I had some of the blandest whites I have ever tasted. "Wedding wine", someone said. "Hen party wine," she added. The reds were excellent though.

At the end of the evening I stood up to announce my next Belgian Beer Tasting, and my plans for an Anglo-French cider taste-off in July. Out of the corner of my eye, as I circulated and tried to gather people's email addresses, I could see Trina sitting sullenly.

In the pub afterwards, it all turned sour. She was annoyed that I was running the beer tasting on an evening I'd told her I'd be getting ready for my France holiday. "You told me you weren't going to do it that night, so I've made other plans." "I know darling--believe me, until half an hour ago, I didn't think I was doing it either. It was just with all those people there and people asking me about the last one, I decided to reinstate it."

What had up to then been a most enjoyable evening, descended into me fencing off her familiar riff, of how I constantly indicate I am not ready for any kind of commitment, about how I exclude her. "I just don't think about 'the relationship' very much, or as deeply as you do," I said--which irritated her even further.

Back here, I laid out my bed downstairs, to which I repair because of her snoring, before going back up to the bedroom. I started getting ready to get into bed with her. "No," she said. "You may as well go now."

I got up this morning and went upstairs to see if we could kiss and make up. She had gone, leaving a farewell note on the pillow, saying that she is "finishing this often lovely and often difficult relationship." A couple of weeks ago we booked a few days away in Strasbourg. "Take Kim," she said. "She'd love it," something which was said unenviously, with her customary generosity.

But on the substantive issue I think she's right: I'm unable to agree to what eventually I would find a stifling, conventional, dreary relationship. The thought of marriage repels me, and I had felt us drifting towards it, without the certificate.

I was appointed Presiding Officer (how grand) at a rural polling station about as distant from Lancaster as it's possible to be without straying into Westmorland. Trina drove me there at 6am on polling day.

Spending fifteen hours in a stranger's company, with no breaks for meals, can be a bit testing, but my poll clerk was a retired policeman with whom I've worked before, keen to share stories from his days as a Superintendant. As in many men's anecdotal conversation, his rhetorical trope was one that involved an assertion of authority, in a way which bends the rules slightly, and which results in the other party giving in by way of not knowing what to say in the face of such a cheeky but powerful flourish.

It was a beautifully situated Station, surrounded by fields and with a view of Ingleborough from the kitchen. We could sit outside much of the time, and I read most of Rose Tremain's The Road Home, mystified why such a straightforward tale told in unremarkable prose, using a small vocabulary, had won the Orange Prize. I can only assume that a story of a struggling but eventually successful immigrant taps into liberal sympathies towards the virtuous outsider that are privileged over considerations of style and invention.

At the end of the poll, Plod was rushing me to get the paperwork finished and due to his haste there was a minor administrative detail which went wrong. I resented this; I have been favoured with more and more work over the years, because I believe I have never made a mistake in any of my Stations' accounts; to hell with "getting away quickly".

The caretaker came to lock up, Plod drove off to his barn conversion, and there was ten minutes in which I felt the guilt that comes from standing alone, absurdly, with a packed up polling station next to me, in the middle of the countryside. My friend arrived to take me and the paraphernalia back to the "leisure" centre where we were to count the votes the following morning. She rolled up a spliff, which heightened my usual nervousness about being in a car.

The highlight of the count was the Conservative candidate in my Division being announced--as all candidates are--surname first, as "Hill, Billy" (and that he came a poor third).

---

From there, it was straight to Kim's amusingly-named village. It's an anglicisation of petit mere, little lake. The lake's long gone and the village we see today was built on an exhausted coal mine, which made me wonder whether the house was going to collapse any minute.

I am smitten with Kim, in that chaste way that I am good at creating. "You are beautiful, sexy, witty and intelligent," I told her at one point. She had on a tight thigh-length blue dress, brown calf-high boots and black tights. She looked gorgeous as she bent over the table to hoover up a white line, the dress stretching round her arse and arcing across her thighs; I told her so, without the detail you lucky readers enjoy. Feeling her next to me in the bed, her little murmurs and sighs and shifting about, was a delight.

On Sunday we slowly got ready for a dance do in Newcastle which was given top billing on the Guardian's clubbing section that weekend. That should have been the first sign that all would not be well. It was the least enjoyable dance event I have ever been to, second only to the time in King's Cross twenty-odd years ago when two rival drug gangs had infiltrated a club I was in. It was an open air cesspit, a piss-wetted, bottle-strewn area where we were kettled with music. Crowds swarmed round the completely inadequate toilets, and we were not allowed to go out.

Kerry Chandler's set was dire, a stop-start series of off-the-shelf clichés, all whooshing and sirens increasing in frequency. Constantly jostled, nudged and simply pushed out of the way, I finally gave in after an hour and a half when a drunk girl fell over heavily right next to us. "I'm not really enjoying this Kim. Do you think we could do something else?"

The way she transformed the evening was almost miraculous. "Let's see if my brother and M--- want to go kite flying." We bought a bottle of cheap sherry, and took the rest of the port and a few bottles of beer. Her relatives were easy company, accepting me straight away. Kim's little niece ran about with the kite, wringing out every bit of energy left in the dusk, while in the intervals between helping her, the adults swigged the booze.

Her brother bought a case of lager and came back to Kim's, where we had an evening which was almost delirious at times with Trevor's sudden, irreverent, sweary jokes. "I love you," I told her, and kissed her while he was out of the room.

Trina couldn't come to the Modern Soul night in St Anne's so I went by myself.

No trains were running that night on that line (I refused the hi-vi'd man's offer of a rail replacement bus service that would have to sloth round a dozen little villages first), so caught a train to Blackpool North instead, thinking I could get a bus from there.

On Blackpool prom the screaming miniskirted girls felt their way forward with a high-heeled gait midway between that of a toddler and a wrestler; lads in tight white logo-ed vests are loudly homosocial, looking not much different from the clientele of Trade. Occasionally, you could see an unguarded moment where someone let her face relax for a moment before hoisting it back into a grinning mask. "I'm enjoying myself! OMG, this is mad!" It all looks like such hard work.

I walked and walked and walked, as far as the South Shore, but there were no buses as the prom's being done up; then gave up and got a taxi. Eleven pounds! It'd be five or six in Lancaster.

I needn't have worried about how it would go socially, sitting and dancing by myself. Several people came over to say hello and to shake my hand, and the female of the organising couple asked about my journey.

In any case, everyone is there to dance, which, as you might deduce from the picture, can sometimes get a little flirty, just as dancing is supposed to be. "Can I just say," I said, as we bumped into each other outside, "that you're wearing the best dress of the evening? Where did you get it from?" Always a good idea to comment on a woman's clothes. Makes you sound a bit poofy and therefore makes them relax. (Debenhams? That's become a lot less frumpy than I remember it.)

---

A few days before I was on a dancefloor not half-chatting up someone else, Trina and I had a wined and coal fired evening playing the Dictionary Game.

Just in case you want to play it yourself with the words I got, I won't give the definitions here, but I will put them in the first comment below.

anetic
heteroclite
grangerize [possibly unhelpful hint: despite the spelling, Granger is a proper noun]
geogony
hobby (give a sense other than "pastime", and not that of a compound)
formication
engrail
heaume
leguleian

And my favourite, which along with "anetic" will be used on this site when the occasion arises...

deturpate

Any woman who can sink a bottle of wine (and then some) in the course of an evening while playing the Dictionary Game, who likes dancing to the same music as me! and who is a bit of a goer, doesn't deserve angry emails like the one I sent her, even when I am rather vexed.

Clearing out my emails this evening, I ran across a slew of things I'll never delete, to and from Mary-Ann. I skipped over the filth; she (and I think I, though you'd have to ask her), was voluptuously good at that. What I noticed was the way my speech had a tendency to mirror hers.

The idea that one has an authentic voice is, in my socially and geographically nomadic experience, mistaken. Yet when I re-read my emails, and saw myself putting on just a little too much literary effort into my sentences, I want to shake my self of eighteen months ago into a more direct form of communication. I instigated a written correspondence with Mary-Ann a few months ago and I sent my second letter to her last week. A letter is more careful and social than an email.

Trina and I cleared another hurtful pile of rocks today. She has been staying at my house from Monday to this afternoon, but Kirsty is in London with Boyf, so yesterday, Trina and I went round to Kirsty's so that I could get the girls their tea before Trina and I went out for ours. I felt inwardly apologetic about dragging Trina along to my former girlfriend's house to be sociable with my daughters, but it was an easily garrulous hour or so with them and their best friend before they went off to their theatre rehearsal.

Trina and I went down the pub and sank a bottle of wine and a few pints respectively. I took her back to mine, tucked her up on the sofa with an internet connection and free rein of my library, then went back to Kirsty's to do more or less the same with my girls. I wrote Jenny a note for her teacher about why she hadn't done her Science homework, due to her rehearsal, although "No child should ever be required to do homework" was what I'd have liked to have written.

This morning, I saw them off to school, then set off back to mine.

I crept up the stairs. Trina's characteristic bellowing tremored through the door. I smiled, went downstairs and started making myself some coffee. An hour or so later I heard her step on the stairs. "Is that [pet names, endearments] coming down the stairs?" I said.

She looked at me crossly. "You're here! Why didn't you come up?"

"I did, I just thought you might like some more sleep." I was crestfallen.

"You didn't, you must have just come in. I've got better things to do than this. We've only got half an hour before you're off again," she said, referring to my work at the elections.

She angrily gathered her things and without giving me any further chance to talk, stomped off to her car and drove away. I turned on the computer.

[With the content of several ellipses deleted].

You veer wildly from telling me how lovely I am, to going off in a huff because you take umbrage at something I've done, or neglected to do. I only ever do things out of consideration for you and what I hoped would be in your best interest, to give you a good night's sleep. I can't be doing with this blowing hot and cold all the time.

I'm sorry that I didn't come up to check on you but I was only thinking of you and trying to be considerate. I misjudged what you wanted me to do and for that I'm sorry.

I am also fucking sick to the back teeth of apologising all the time for mistakes that I make, that are only ever done with you and your comfort or happiness in mind. "Sorry sorry sorry"--it's all I fucking say.

I don't appear to be good enough for you. Why don't you find someone who can read your mind better, who understands the details of what you want better, because I can't be doing with all this being all loved-up one minute, and then left here alone, looking forward to making you breakfast and chatting and hugging you, with you driving off, the next minute.

As for me having "to go off again", what do you expect me to do? Ring up the Council and say "Sorry, I can't come today, because I know you're providng me with some well-paid work which will pay for my family holiday, but I've got to stay here and hope I don't piss my girlfriend off"? That work is essential to me, you know that, so why are you so annoyed with me doing it? I know the timing's not perfect but I can't tell them when I want to do it.

P.S. You've left your coat here.

Yours, a very pissed off and I think, unjustly wronged, looby, who was only trying his misguided best.

She'd only got as far as her narrowboat a few miles away, and came back. She met me from my break from the elections work. We hugged each other gratefully, even as I knew that I don't--I can't--love Trina, just as I never loved Kirsty, or anyone else. I have never had the experience of what others talk about as "love". We only had a brief time together: we tucked into pizza slices whilst sat on a bench.

She said she was sorry for seeing everything in terms of her being rejected, despite all the evidence I provide to the contrary. Tired at this point by analysis, we rummaged around for comments about the pizza to lighten things up.